heir steps from the further corner of the field, where some
preserves of Lord Maxwell's approached very closely to the big Mellor
wood, and came back again along the diagonal path within fifty yards or
so of the men in the ditch.

In the stillness the poachers could hear Westall's harsh and peremptory
voice giving some orders to his underling, or calling to the dogs, who
had scattered a little in the stubble. Hurd's own dog quivered beside
him once or twice.

Then steps and voices faded into the distance and all was safe.

The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers' progress
along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.

"_Ee_ be sold again--blast 'im!" said Hurd, with a note of quite
disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice. "Now I'll set
them snares. But you'd better git home."

Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him
two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his
poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a
way as possible.

Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden
crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three
hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.

Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor
church. The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and
he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.

Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of
the hills in the frosty silence. Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over
the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to
climb the ascent of the wood. The outskirts of it were filled with a
thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it
was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon,
now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid
the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about
their polished trunks. Such infinite grace and strength in the line work
of the branches!--branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected
fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable
harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against
the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as
though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, w